Tafaemi’s skin was so soft that it seemed like it had become one of the creams that she slathered on it. Her hair was so heavy and thick that Manrie suspected that its gold was just an enamel that would reveal some dull, drab metal if it were scraped. She and her son were utterly alone when the caravan came up to them, but Manrie could sense the leers and gazes of men clinging to Tafaemi like scraps of ripped clothing.

“They’ve sent us out here to die!” the woman wailed, almost as soon as Cloedeya had brought the wagons to a halt.

“Who has sent you?” Cloedeya asked, laying a calming hand on the side of the ox’s wide neck.

“Who do you think? Macbrau, of course!”

“But you were so happy, when we were here last autumn.”

“It was two autumns ago, and *she* wasn’t even pregnant, *then*.”

“Liezhae is pregnant?”

“Not anymore. She had the baby, didn’t she? And then she told Macbrau a pack of lies. Said that I was always talking down to her, bossing her around. Because of Malekeisae.”

At the sound of his name, a boy had been leaping between the large rocks that littered the way glanced back at her. He had been humming to himself, ignoring the arrival of the caravan. Little Praeda, who was lying with Manrie along the floor of the pantry wagon and staring out through a slightly raised panel, seemed fascinated by this child, who had golden hair like his mother but a wily hardness in his preoccupied gaze.

“Well, you were never very kind to her,” Cloedeya said.

“Whose side are you on? And anyway, I couldn’t be kind. If I didn’t point out that Malekeisae was Macbrau’s only son, Liezhae would keep treating me like a slave, wouldn’t she?”

“You are a slave.”

This infuriated the blonde woman. “*Was* a slave. I stopped *being* a slave as soon as I had Malekeisae. Not much good it did me in the long run.”

This seemed to enrage Melsa, who has been standing a few feet back from Cloedeya, scowling at the rocky ground. “You always do that,” she said sharply. “You disparage and belittle everything around you, even your son. Of course he did you good. Does you good.”

At this the woman started to cry. “But they’ve sent us out here to starve to death! The sun beats down at us during the day, and there are creatures that come prowling about at night. We haven’t had anything to eat or drink in two days!”

“We just left a the Spring at Five Rocks this morning,” Cloedeya said patiently. “It’s less than a morning’s walk away. Quicker for you, since you don’t have wagons.”

Tafaemi dismissed this. “Maybe the boy could go there. It would be too much for me.”

“Why didn’t you bring any food with you when they sent you away?” Melsa asked, moving her wide shoulders back and forth, as if preparing to swing an arm out and slap the woman.

“And who would carry it?”

“But you have a basket right there.”

The woman glanced at the basket by her side and said, “That contains my unguents.”

“You’d rather be beautiful than feed your child.”

“I only have a child because I’m beautiful.”

“Did you think some man would come along and save you?”

Tafaemi simpered at Cloedeya. “Some man has come along and saved me.”

“But we’re going to Tzurfaera,” Cloedeya said gently. “Will Macbrau welcome you back?”

Tafeami shrugged. “So we don’t go to Macbrau. We go to the Enrieghos, on the other side of the valley. They’ll take me in. Rue Enriegho has always blessed me with his regard.”

“Why didn’t you go to them to begin with?”

“Macbrau made his men march us out here. And besides,” she said, with another glance at her unguents, “I thought that one of the Enrieghos might happen to come along.”

“Well,” Cloedeya said, “you might as well ride in the sleeping wagon. Malekeisae can walk with me, if he likes.” He went to the side of the sleeping wagon and banged on the panel. “Taeyaho, you’ll have to get up. We have guests.” He turned his head and saw Manrie peaking from the pantry wagon. He looked back at Tafaemi, who had not yet moved from her seat on a rather low and couch-like rock. “Any visitors in Tzurfaera right now?”

Tafaemi pouted. “No one. And no one has come up the road for three days.”

“Unfortunate,” Cloedeya said. “We’ll have to hold two feasts, then. One for the Enrieghos and one for Macbrau and his people. Guests do bring the warring camps together. But we have some remarkable ham to offer, and a butter that makes peas dance when they’re cooked in it.” He glanced back at Manrie. “It’s a good thing we have some extra hands.” He strode to the pantry wagon and lifted the panel. “Here are Little Praeda and Kumynoe, guarding the cheeses.”

Tafaemi grazed them with disinterested eyes. Malekeisae, who had clambered down from the rocks, tossed a stone in their direction. “Have you gotten rid of the one with no name?” his mother asked.

“No, I’m here,” Big Praeda said, stepping from behind one of the wagons, where she had obviously been hiding.

“So dull, not to have a name,” Tafaemi yawned.

“Father says she has a name,” Malekeisae said with a canny look. “Only they won’t tell us what it is.”

Taeyaho chose that moment to emerge from the sleeping wagon. He stood in the hard sunlight, half naked and blinking sleepily. Then he noticed Tafaemi and his whole demeanor changed. He blushed, stammered, and gave a little bow. Tafaemi greeted him by spreading her arms wide and pushing out her bosom. “There’s my darling boy!”

To Manrie’s horror, her beautiful friend took two quick strides and buried himself in the horrid woman’s embrace. “Inexplicable, isn’t it,” Big Praeda murmured, coming up to her side. “It’s because he’s never known a mother.”

The sloth and weight of Tafaemi’s presence made the wagon’s go even slower. She kept the wall panel of the sleeping wagon open, and Taeyaho walked beside her, his face tilted shyly at the ground, smiling softly as she reached out a wan hand and stroked his cheek. Her son had insisted on riding on the ox’s back, and didn’t notice this. He protested in a high, domineering voice when Cloedeya pulled the ox to a halt. The whole procession juddered with the sudden stop, and Manrie, who was walking glumly along the side of the road, saw Taeyaho’s head jerk up to meet Cloedeya’s backward glance. He went forward without comment and stood with Cloedeya, examining the ground before them.

“Why have we stopped? Why have we stopped?” Malekeisae shrieked from the ox’s back.

Manrie went forward and stood beside the two men. She saw what they saw — disturbed earth, a smear of blood on a rock, and scratches along the trunk of an old withered tree that grew stubbornly out of the barren ground. Cloedeya turned and walked back to the sleeping wagon. “When did the last caravan leave Tzurfaera?”

“Oh, caravans, they come and go,” Tafaemi said indifferently.

“Try to remember.”

"How could I pay attention to caravans, with Liezhae plotting against me?”

“No one passed you on the road?”

“I told you, we’ve been dying in the hot sun for three days.”

“You don’t act like someone who hasn’t had anything to drink for three days.”

“Perhaps it was two days.”

“It was two nights ago,” he son called back, and then smirked when she gave an embarrassed shriek.

“Well, *I* can’t be expected to keep track of time.”

“There’s been violence on this road.”

Tafaemi fanned herself. “Well, I’m sure it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

It was almost dusk when they came over the last rise and saw the narrow valley that held Tzurfaera squeezed between two high cliffs. Manrie had been here once before. She and Aizdha had been guests of the Enrieghos, bidden to explore the mines on their side of the valley. She had wondered, then, at the high walls of their compound, and the men who patrolled along them, looking out at the meager and dispirited town that was compressed between the two opposing camps. As the wagon juddered along the uneven roadway, she gestured at the cliffs and whispered to Melsa, “They were made by some monster, you know. Aizdha called it the lacing worm, since the caves on the north cliff are mirrored by the caves on the south cliff. Like they were the eyelets of a shoe.”

Melsa shivered and wrapped her arms around her chest. “I hate coming here.”

“Why *do* you come here?”

“Cloedeya says we have to go everywhere. He says that we bring joy, and that Tzurfaera needs joy more than most places.”

Manrie considered. “It is joyless,” she agreed. Her gaze returned to the holes in the cliffs. She was filled with a sudden sharp sadness at Aizdha’s absence, compounded by the fact that she wouldn’t see him that night. The ghosts had disappeared once she’d buried the bestiary, as if they had never been following her, but the book itself. But then, she had always known that her master loved his book more than her.

They threaded their way through the narrow town, past a sulky looking tavern and a tea house. There was a wide, beaten space which the caravans occupied when they came through. A desultory alchemist’s sign swung from a weathered crossbeam. Cloedeya turned the oxen to the right, towards the Enriegho’s compound along the south cliff.

They were met at the gate by two men, one armed with a cudgel and the other with a spear. Word of their arrival was sent back into the compound, and after some moments Ahlo Enriegho emerged. Manrie remembered his thin, foxy face, and the freckles on his dark skin. The setting sun glinted off of copper color hair. He looked up at them from beneath a lowered brow, as if he were shy, or up to something mischievous. Men crowded into the gateway behind him.

The wagon creaked as Tafaemi got down from it. “Ahlo, Ahlo!” she called, as if she needed to get his attention. “Tell Rue that I’ve come to be with him. That I can now truly be his, as we dreamed when we were young!”

Her son craned his head over the side of the ox and spit in the dirt. Ahlo looked at him, then at his mother, and then down at his own hands, which were cupped in front of him, as if he were holding something delicate. They were calloused, hardened hands, and they were empty. “Rue isn’t here,” he said in a scratchy voice.

“Then we will wait for him,” Tafaemi said imperiously.

Ahlo studied her, a bright spark in his hooded eyes. “Did Macbrau send you?”

“Send me? He sent me to die in the wilderness, that’s what he did! And all at Liezhae’s bidding.”

“We found her there,” Cloedeya said, a note of apology in his voice. “And we found signs of a scuffle, about a mile further up the road.”

The younger Enriegho brother turned and looked at someone behind him. There was something in this gesture that Manrie didn’t like. For some reason she found herself looking around for Little Praeda. She saw the girl peeking out from behind the pantry wagon, and breathed as sigh of relief when she saw Melsa standing protectively behind her.

“It has been sometime since you visited us,” Ahlo said.

“A number of years,” Cloedeya agreed.

Ahlo considered this. He glanced back again and then said, “You are welcome here. We welcome your feast.”

The wagons rattled through the gate. Cloedeya led the ox to a patch of beaten ground beside a well. He seemed indifferent to the strange, watchful attitudes of the Enriegho’s men. He and Taeyaho went about pulling down the side panels of the wagons with their habitual efficiency, and Melsa and Big Praeda came forward to help bring provisions out of the pantry wagon. Manrie went to help them, and Little Praeda came to her side. For a moment it seemed as if the scene would relax into normality. But Ahlo Enriegho stood beside the well, his thin body tense, his large, strong hands cupped in front of him. He glanced past the wagons towards someone who was still standing by the gate, and Manrie followed his gaze. He was looking at a thin but blocky man whose hair was a shocking white. Little Praeda caught sight of the man and gasped and clutched at Manrie’s hand. Manrie turned her head back to Ahlo, who had shifted his gaze and was looking right at her. She met his gaze, daring him to recognize her. A line of confusion appeared on his freckled brow. Then he shook himself slightly and spoke to Cloedeya.

“I have always wondered how you can travel so freely, without anyone trying to stop you.”

Cloedeya, who had unfurled his roll of knives and was sharpening one of them, glanced up, saw the expression on Ahlo’s face, and froze. “Why would anyone stop us?”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“The great cook, famed throughout the Sand Hills, and no one has tried to make you a slave?”

Carefully, with feigned indifference, Cloedeya returned to sharpening his knife. “If they made me a slave, I wouldn’t be able to collect the herbs and spices, the vegetables, the dried fish and hams and smoked beef, the unusual eggs and legumes that make my dishes so special.”

“There are caravans. Merchants who would bring those things to us.”

“No one else knows where to find half-moon mint, or where the golden peacocks nest.”

“I’m sure I could convince you to tell me where to look for them.”

Cloedeya paused and looked squarely at the other man. “Would you enslave me, Ahlo Enriegho? You were my friend, when we were young. You and your brother.”

The foxy-face lowered to the ground. “My brother wouldn’t. Perhaps he will come back.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“You’ll stay here awhile. Until he does.”

“How long has he been missing?” Cloedeya asked in a low voice.

“Two nights. And you say you saw signs of violence along the road.”

“We were not involved in it.”

Ahlo shifted his gaze to Tafaemi, who had gone to sit on the rim of the well and was fanning herself with a lace cloth. “Make your meal,” he told Cloedeya. “Perhaps it will entice my brother to return to us.”

There were women in the household, but they were shy, peeking from the windows and doors. There was also a gaggle of boys, who emerged as soon as Ahlo left the courtyard and immediately started a fist fight with Malekeisae, as his mother shrieked in protest. Manrie gathered with the others around Cloedeya, and they whispered to each other beneath the sound of the scuffle.

“Don’t worry,” he told them. “If Ahlo tries to keep us here, the First Families of Hiraherra and Raesidae will demand our freedom.”

“What do we do?” Melsa asked, hanging her pretty head between her wide shoulders.

“We cook the feast.”

“And after?”

“We go to Macbrau’s compound, if they’ll let us. If they won’t let us,” he said, preempting Melsa’s question, “we stay here until we’re allowed to leave. Maybe until Rue comes back.”

He gave them instructions, and they set about their work. Manrie, tasked with carrying hams from the pantry wagon, almost tripped over Little Praeda, who seemed intent on hiding herself behind Manrie’s legs.

“Praeda!” she said sharply, and the little girl started to cry. Manrie’s arms were full, so she couldn’t pick her up, but she didn’t protest when Praeda slipped beneath her robes, even though this made it very hard to move with anything like grace. Once she’d deposited the hams on a table she waited as the girl extricated herself, then squatted down beside her and said, “You can’t behave like this. We’re all scared. You have to be strong.”

The little girl shook her head. “It’s not that. It’s Laenrid.”

Manrie frowned. The name was familiar to her, although she couldn’t quite place it. “Laenrid?”

The girl nodded. “Mama thought he was following us. But he’s here instead.”

“Oh,” Manrie said. And then, “Oh!” She looked around quickly and saw Cloedeya, bending over the iron grill, trying to light a fire with shaking hands. Another glance around the courtyard revealed the block-shaped man, standing with three others by the gate. They seemed engaged in desultory conversation, not aware of Little Praeda at all. “Get under my skirts again,” Manrie said. “Match your steps to mine. I’ll go slow.”

They crossed to Cloedeya, who looked up at Manrie as if about to issue an order, then stopped when he saw her expression. “What now?”

“One of the men here,” Manrie whispered. “He’s been hunting Little Praeda. He’s a very bad man.”

Cloedeya’s mismatched eyes stopped wandering and focused on her. “Has he seen her yet?”

“I don’t think so.”

He nodded. “There’s a path up the cliffside. You can get to it through a gate behind the smelting house.”

“How? Everyone is looking at us.”

“Go pretend to look for something in the pantry wagon. Take your time. We’ll cause a distraction. Find your way to Macbrau’s compound, if you can.”

Both side panels of the wagon were open. Manrie pushed Praeda up into the wagon and then clambered in after her to stand among the urns and tied vegetables. Praeda slipped back under Manrie’s skirts, but a glance towards the gate showed her that the blocky man was still watching, and she doubted that he was fooled. She saw Taeyaho walk past Cloedeya out of the corner of her eye. Cloedeya said something, and handed Taeyaho a platter. He hefted it onto his shoulder and walked towards the well, grinning in his bright, distanced way. Tafaemi watched him approach, batting her eye lashes in the dying summer light. He lowered the platter and lifted a piece of pickled vegetable from it, and held it teasingly above her mouth. She simpered and then snapped at it with her little teeth. Manrie was aware that the gazes of the men in the courtyard had turned towards the well. Taeyaho raised another piece of pickle into the air, and Tafaemi giggled, a bright, feminine sound that made Manrie blush. Then Tafaemi cried out and slapped Taeyaho away. He stepped back, confused. Tafaemi began to shake all over, her ripe breasts bouncing back and forth as she screeched, “You dropped it down my robes, you foolish boy!”

Manrie grabbed Praeda, slipped over the edge of the wagon, and ran for the gate. They were through it and on the path up the cliffside within moments, and Tafaemi’s giggling, screeching voice followed them until they came to the first flight of stone steps that ran along the surface of the cliff. It took them to the first lace hole, the one that the Enrieghos used as a barrow. There were two guards standing at its entrance. One of them gasped and the other immediately lowered a spear. Manrie stopped, flinging a protective hand across Praeda’s chest and pulling her close.

“Are you spirits?” One of the men asked in a rough, low voice.

“Of course we’re not spirits.”

The man narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “Your robes are very white.”

“We wash them daily.”

“What, daily?” the other man said. “You can’t wash them daily! There isn’t enough soap in the world to wash clothes *daily*.”

Manrie sniffed. She was shaking slightly from their dash up the path, but she forced the quiver from her voice. “You seem to be on a yearly cycle.”

The guard straightened, offended. “I wash ‘em whenever it rains. Just like everyone else.”

“Well, it doesn’t rain soap from the sky, apparently.”

His companion grew tired of this banter. “Where are you going?”

Manrie stared at him. “You don’t remember me? I am Aizdha’s assistant.” When she saw them struggling to remember who Aizdha was, she snapped, “The monster hunter.”

“Oh, him,” the second guard said, suddenly bashful. “You remember, Delharro, the one who came to look at the skull.” He shuddered, then peered at Manrie. “You were with him, were you?”

“Yes,” she said patiently, “and now I’m back. Ahlo Enriegho has asked me to investigate the caves higher up.”

The guards exchanged glances. “You came quick.”

“I happened to be in the area.”

“And he thinks that Rue’s up there, does he?”

“He’s looked already,” the other guard said.

“Maybe he didn’t know what to look for,” Manrie told him.

“What’s the girl for?” the second guard demanded.

“What do you think she’s for?”

Manrie could see the men’s imaginations turning over nasty possibilities. “Well, go on, then,” the first guard said. “And wear darker clothing. We thought you was spirits.”

Manrie pulled Praeda past them along the darkened path that wound upward towards the second cave. She could hear the guards mumbling as they left them behind.

“He’s not up there. I was with Ahlo when he looked.”

“Yeah, but the caves are strange. Sometimes they’re different than they were before, you know that.”

“Manrie,” Praeda whispered, “did you find teeth?”

“Teeth?”

“In the skull.”

“Never mind that now. Here’s the second cave. Five more to pass, and then we’ll have to climb a ladder onto the top of the cliff.”

“I’m afraid.”

“Well, you can’t be. Not now.”

As they passed the highest cave, Manrie glanced into its dark opening, trying to remember what it had looked like when she and Aizdha had been there years before. She remembered it as fairly shallow, not going back more than two hundred feet, and full of strange echos. There had been a hole dug in the floor, and a ladder leading down to the vast, echoing chamber where Rue Enriegho had found the skull. She and her master had spent many hours measuring it, sketching it, speculating about the teeth that clung to its heavy jaws, which were sharp and pointed, not the type of teeth that could grind away rock. Aizdha had said that this creature couldn’t have been the worm that made the lace holes. Manrie paused for a moment, and considered leading Praeda down into the darkness, where it was unlikely that anyone would look for them. But the girl was clutching tightly at her hand, and Manrie couldn’t bring herself to take her into that ancient grave.

They came to the ladder and climbed it, with the little girl only one rung ahead of Manrie, so that she was embraced as she went, although Manrie’s arms ached from holding her body curved so that the child could fit within the ellipse of her chest and thighs. She didn’t look down. She wondered if anyone had spotted the whiteness of their robes against the cliff face.

Reaching the top, they crawled outward into warm summer grasses. The bluffs were alive with the sound of insects and frogs. She and Praeda lay flat, catching their breaths. After a moment, Manrie sat up and looked around. The grasses slanted downwards towards a stand of trees, and a silver line of river ran between them. Praeda climbed into Manrie’s lap. “Praeda,” she said, “we can’t rest here.”

“I’m scared.”

“That’s why we need to keep moving.”

“I don’t have my blindfold!”

“We’ll be okay. We haven’t seen any ghosts since I buried the book.”

“I saw them before I met you. They were following me and mama.”

“That’s true. It’s strange. Well,” Manrie said, getting to her feet and pulling Praeda upwards, “maybe they just like the bestiary better than they like us. I had a dog once, or I thought I did. It followed me for three days as I went on errands around the city, and I fed it scraps. Then we passed a butcher’s shop, and the butcher threw some offal to it, and it never followed me again.”

“That’s not very nice.”

“I don’t think it cared about being nice. It was just a dog. It cared about being hungry.”

“I’m hungry.”

“I know. I am, too. But I don’t even have my snares.” Suddenly she felt very exposed. They hadn’t been with the caravan for very long, maybe less than a single moon cycle, and already she had come to expect that Cloedeya and the others would take care of them. That she didn’t need to be wary or equipped. A sense of her own foolishness slapped at her and she felt her cheeks becoming hot. “I guess we have to go to the other compound. Macbrau’s compound.”

“It’s as I thought,” a voice said from behind them, and Manrie twisted around. She pushed Praeda off her lap and went into a low crouch, her knife slipping from her sleeve into her hand. A figure had emerged from the top of the ladder and was stepping to one side so that another figure could climb onto the bluff behind him. “It *is* the false daughter, just as I thought.”

“Who are you?” Manrie demanded, although she knew. The figure stepped forward, and a third man came onto the bluff.

“Amurka’s little lie,” the man said. His teeth flashed in the moonlight, white against his shadowed face. Manrie looked at his hands, assessing the threat. He was clutching a small, dully-gleaming hatchet.

“I’m not a lie,” Praeda said. Manrie straightened and started to back away, pushing the girl behind her.

“Her little lie,” the man repeated. He was slurring his words slightly.

“You’re drunk,” Manrie told him. She glanced at the two who were flanking him. “He killed a whole village. Just so that he could pretend that his girlfriend had waited for him.”

“We know,” one of the men said. “We were there.”

Manrie took another step backwards. She flashed the knife in the moonlight. One of the men was holding a pick axe. The other was a club. Laenrid lazily tossed his hatchet from one hand to the other.

“Well, she’s dead,” Manrie said.

The grin faded from Laenrid’s face. The gleam of his eyes disappeared as he blinked once, then blinked again. “Amurka is dead?”

“She died in a mountain meadow. A zaizectu killed her.” She took another step backwards. She was moving downhill, towards the trees, knowing that she was given the men the advantage of height, and the trees were too far for her and Praeda to ever reach.

“Impossible,” Laenrid decided. “If a zaizectu killed her, it would have killed the girl, too, wouldn’t it? Where is she hiding?”

“She’s hiding in death. We were followed by her ghost for many days.” She heard Praeda suck in her breath.

The shadowed face turned and looked about facetiously. Moonlight caught on his stark white hair. “Then where’s her ghost?”

As soon as he said it, there was a sound behind Manrie. Laenrid froze, looking past her shoulder. She risked a glimpse behind her. A horse had emerged from the line of trees. The figure astride it had wide shoulders that moved oddly on its stolid body.

Manrie hissed out her fear and turned Praeda, backing away from both threats along the slant of the hill. The horse clomped slowly towards them. It shook its head and snorted, the sound carrying above the chorus of crickets and frogs. Laenrid and his men stood, waiting for it.

“Bounty hunter,” he said, when the horse was a dozen strides from him.

“The butcher of Hareramanda,” the figure in the muslin mask said. Its voice was oddly gruff, pitched low, and the words sounded dusty.

The moon’s reflection in Laenrid’s eyes seemed to turn liquid with fright and spill out. “You can’t be here for me!” The figure didn’t answer him. “There was no one left to set a bounty!” he protested, and then he laughed. It was a high pitched laugh that seemed to merge with the insect voices that sang over the hillside. He fell silent before the figure’s passivity. Then, with a sudden jerk of an arm, he sent his hatchet spinning through the air. It was well thrown, and it embedded itself in the bounty hunter’s head.

For one frozen moment nothing happened. Then the bounty hunter’s shoulders rose and fell in a sigh, and a dagger whipped out and sliced through the air to strike Laenrid in the shoulder. He fell back into the grass. The man who was holding the club turned and ran at Manrie, lifting the club and bellowing. A flash of moonlight along a blade, and he fell forward, his body breaking the long grasses. Manrie ran, dragging Praeda behind her.

The trees were just ahead, a dark line of soft shadow. A drum owl hooted. The horse’s hoofs pounded through the grass. Manrie tensed herself, waiting for the dagger in her back, and felt the loom of the horse. It was going to run her down. And then it was gone, passing to her right. It circled in front of her and came to a stop. The bounty hunter looked down at her, the hatchet’s handle projecting from its forehead like a horn. Manrie steadied herself. Her breath was coming in gasps. She looked at her pursuer and he looked at her. Then she dropped her knife and squatted down, and felt a moment of sharp relief as Praeda clambered onto her back.

The bounty hunter gave a little laugh. With one fluid movement, he threw a leg over the side of the horse and dismounted. Then he reached up and removed his own head.

Praeda screamed. There was something strange about the bounty hunter’s neck. It was topped by hair, and eyes glinted from between the man’s shoulder blades. The bounty hunter set the head down in the long grasses, reached up again, and removed his own shoulders. The shape became human. Short, rather stocky, with glittering eyes peering from between wrinkled cheeks. An old woman.

She was quite still for a moment, observing Manrie and Praeda carefully. And then she gave a chiming laugh. “I rarely do that,” she said, “but it’s always so delightful when I do. Poor child. Did you think I was coming to kill you?”

“You killed those men,” Manrie said.

The woman nodded. Her iron hair was short and spiky. “Should I have spared them?”

“They were your bounty?”

“Oh no,” the woman said. “That would be you.”

Manrie tensed, preparing to run again, but the woman held up a hand. “The Archivist of the Third Tower sent me to find you. To bring you back home. With the book. You made it easy, by going to Haerahiz.”

“Haerahiz?”

“The Man on the Mountain. An old friend. Why did you run?”

“They…they would have blamed me for Aizdha’s death.”

The woman shook her head. “No. That was clearly an accident. But avoidable. Baenlaez is the only one to blame, although he claims he was asleep when it happened. Caught up in a betzazarra dream.”

“Do you mean the mushroom man?”

A smile puckered the rather hard and thin mouth. “Oh, I suppose. He has always had a rather pungent odor. But he wouldn’t like being called ‘the mushroom man’.”

“Then…then I ran for no reason?”

“Yes. And I didn’t see much purpose in chasing you. I told myself that if you journeyed much beyond Haerahiz’s house, I would return to the Archivist and tell him that I couldn’t find you. But then you stole my horse.”

“I’m sorry. It died.”

“I’m more interested in what was in the saddle bags.”

Manrie glanced down at the moonlit grasses, taking a mental inventory of everything that had been in the bags when she stole them. Food, mostly. Cheese, flatbread, jerky. Pickled cabbage. “Do you mean the skewer?” she asked.

“Skewer? I have always called it the ‘needle.’ But yes, that is what I mean.”

Manrie thought quickly. “Will you make me go back to Libreigia?”

“You don’t want to go back?”

“I’m a slave, there.”

“Some would say that you’re a slave here, too. A slave who ran away. But it’s not an ontological status.”

“What does that mean?”

The woman sighed. “It is sad, how we lose words. It means that it’s not a question of being. You are not a slave by nature. Only by circumstance.”

“I don’t want to go back.”

“Then you won’t. Give me the needle, and I’ll even let you keep the book.”

Manrie glanced behind her. She narrowed her eyes in calculation. “I don’t have it.”

The woman sighed. “That is very bad news. Where is it?”

“Down there. In the Enrieghos compound.”

“Let’s go get it then.”

“You just killed three of their men.”

“Laenrid and his two goons? I doubt that Rue Enriegho would accept them into his little gang.”

“Rue’s missing.”

The woman frowned. Then she walked past Manrie and Praeda, leading the horse up the incline. Manrie looked at the trees, considered, but then turned to follow the bounty hunter. The woman stood at the edge of the rise, looking down at the long grasses. “It seems that Laenrid is missing, too,” she said when they came up to her. “I must have only injured him.” She glanced at Manrie. “What were you going to do?”

“We were going to Macbrau’s. Ahlo says that he’s going to enslave Cloedeya and the others.”

The woman snorted. “And you think Macbrau will help with that?”

“That’s where Cloedeya told us to go,” Manrie said stubbornly.

The woman tilted her head and looked up at the sky. Then she looked down at the valley, considering. “Then that’s where I’ll go, too.”